Police-State Australia
Australian civil liberties have always been "notional," with or
without these sweeping draconian laws they are ramming through federal
and state parliaments at the moment. Just ask any Aborignal Australian.
Even when pretending to inclusivity and multi-culturalism, Australia is
at base a deeply conflicted white supremacist Anglo-Saxon-Celt settler
colony built on the genocide and displacement of its indigenous
population and the systematic marginalization and discrimination of
all non-Anglo-Saxon-Celt-Germano-Scandanavian-Slavs who may immigrate
there. I lived in Australia on and off for a total of 16+ years. While
not as tightly surveillanced as the UK is, where you have CCTVs on every
square bloc and where local councils have the ability to tap your
phones and hack into your mail and computers without a court order,
Australia has never been far behind its parent country on that front.
Add to that the fact that consecutive commonwealth governments, from
Hawke-Keating Labor to the present Abbot-Turbull (LNC) Tories, have
molded Australia into a neoliberal capitalist dystopia from hell, and it
does not take much to have seen this coming from 1000+ miles away.
Be that as it may, the curses of the spirits of the Land and the
ancestors be upon these pale faced invaders and their contrived
authority and all those who help them. Amin!
Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/06/terr-o06.html
By
Mike Head
Source: http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/10/06/terr-o06.html
Australian governments unveil sweeping new police powers
By
Mike Head
6 October 2017
The Liberal-National Coalition federal government and the state and
territory governments, most of which are controlled by the Labor Party,
yesterday announced an extraordinary increase in police powers.
The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) summit agreed
unanimously to sweeping new measures, including “real-time” use of
facial recognition technology to monitor the population, 14-day police
detention without charge, expanded powers to call out the military to
deal with domestic unrest, and vague new criminal offences.
Yesterday’s announcement marks another nodal point in the bipartisan
agreement of the Coalition and Labor to erect the framework for a
police-state. The powers are truly Orwellian, that is, reminiscent of
the totalitarian nightmare of universal political surveillance and
repression presented by George Orwell in his novel 1984.
The new powers add to the more than 70 tranches of
“counter-terrorism” legislation already imposed on the population since
2001. The politicians, backed by the corporate media, claimed the
measures are intended to “keep people safe.”
In reality, the “war on terrorism” has been a fraudulent cover for
the evisceration of fundamental legal and democratic rights. Each of the
latest measures extend far beyond combatting purported terrorist
threats, and severely erode the civil liberties of the entire
population.
The Labor Party premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, was the most
explicit in dismissing any concerns about civil liberties, which he
disparaged as a “luxury” of “notional considerations.”
Far from a “luxury,” rights such as freedom from political
surveillance and protection from detention without trial were won
through centuries of social and class struggle against absolutist
regimes and capitalist governments.
In unison with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, Andrews sought to
depict the overturning of core legal rights as only affecting a minority
of the population. “We are going to have to curtail the rights and
freedoms of a small number of people in order to keep the vast majority
of Australians safe,” he stated.
Every authoritarian regime has made the same claim. An examination of
the measures themselves exposes the lie that only a “minority” will be
affected.
First, as some technology experts warned, the “national facial
biometric matching capability” adopted at the COAG summit will permit
police and intelligence agencies to quickly pick out any individual in
shopping areas, large cultural and sporting events, and political
demonstrations. According to the COAG communiqué, this system will be
targeted at not just terrorism suspects, but “other criminal activity.”
CCTV, drones and other increasingly sophisticated photographic and
facial recognition devices will enable authorities to almost
instantaneously match facial images to those in a national database of
passport, visa and citizenship images, now to be expanded by the
addition of all state and territory driver’s licence photos.
Turnbull denied suggestions by some journalists that this could lead
to “Big Brother” mass surveillance, but he confirmed that the technology
could be used in public spaces such as shopping malls. The prime
minister also admitted that unspecified “private companies” would be
given access to the intelligence information.
Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Paul Smith
described the plan as “horrifying.” It “would hoover up the vast
majority of the rest of us, and remove any notion of a right to expect
privacy in our day-to-day lives (and yes, we have no Bill of Rights.)”
On the City A.M. website, Tom
Chatfield, a technology author, wrote: “Imagine. A super-high resolution
drone camera captures ten thousand faces from a crowd in one shot; an
algorithm processes and identifies over ninety percent of them within
moments; the results are cross-referenced with billions of bytes of
other data, dating back decades. All of this is preserved indefinitely
and shared widely, with corporations and governments tracking everything
from credit and criminality to protest and voting patterns—and none of
this process is either visible to you, reversible or accountable.”
Second, even children as young as 10 will be subjected to federal and
state laws that permit police to detain “suspects” for up to 14 days of
questioning before laying charges. This applies to any
terrorism-related offences, which are defined so broadly that they could
capture a range of political activities, such as opposing Australian
military interventions.
Justice Minister Michael Keenan told the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation it was “deeply regrettable” that children could be held
under the new powers, but he claimed Islamic State specialised in the
“radicalisation” and recruitment of children.
As recently as 2015, Turnbull said such detention would be
unconstitutional, because only courts have the power to “punish” people
under the Australian Constitution’s separation of powers provisions. But
now the state and territory leaders have agreed to meaningless
“safeguards,” such as supervision by magistrates, that Turnbull claims
overcomes the constitutional issue.
Just a decade ago, in 2007, a public outcry erupted when the
Australian Federal Police (AFP) used “investigation” detention powers to
hold an innocent man, Gold Coast-based doctor Mohamed Haneef, for 12
days without charge. That furore played a role, a few months later, in
the landslide defeat of the Howard Liberal-National government. The
incoming Rudd-Gillard Labor government was forced to promise limits on
the power. That pretence has now been thrown overboard.
Third, two new serious criminal offences were unveiled at
COAG—possessing “instructional terrorist material” and staging a
terrorism hoax. These further widen the already vast scope for the
authorities to use so-called anti-terrorism laws to organise
provocations against broader expressions of political discontent.
Fourth, the COAG leaders agreed to yet-unseen legislation proposed by
Turnbull’s government to expedite the domestic mobilisation of the
Australian Defence Force. While Turnbull spoke of using troops “in the
event of a terrorist incident,” the military call-out powers are tied to
what the Constitution calls “domestic violence”—a term for political or
social unrest deemed threatening to the existing political order.
This is not the end of the assault on democratic rights. Turnbull
foreshadowed further measures. He said the Coalition, which has passed
nine tranches of “national security legislation” since 2013, was
determined to “stay ahead of the threat of terrorism.” Labor leader Bill
Shorten has stated his “in-principle” support for the decisions at
COAG.
Already, a previous COAG gathering agreed to a “post-sentence
detention regime,” whereby prisoners convicted of “serious” offences—not
just terrorist-related—can be kept in prison, potentially for life,
even after their sentences have expired.
Over the past three months, the Turnbull government has unveiled the most substantial revamping
of the country’s “security” apparatus since the global political
convulsions of the 1960s and 1970s. This includes plans for a Home
Affairs super-ministry to take command of seven agencies, such as the
AFP, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) and Australian
Border Force (ABF), and a new US-style Office of National Intelligence
(ONI) in the prime minister’s office, headed by a Director-General of
National Intelligence.
In June and August this year, the federal and state governments,
aided by the media, laid the propaganda basis for the latest measures by
exploiting dubious terrorist incidents, one involving a hostage-taking by a mentally unstable young man, and an implausible “airport” plot to blow up a plane with a bomb encased in a meat grinder or kill the passengers using rotten egg gas.
The WSWS warned at the time that the manner in which governments
seized on these events pointed to plans for another boosting of
police-state powers. As a recent intelligence review
revealed, ruling circles are wracked by immense political fears,
related to rising social and political disaffection and the prospect of
mass opposition to its mounting preparations for war. The review
highlighted the global turmoil and uncertainties produced by the Trump
administration, and the seething discontent in every country, including
Australia, generated by ever-greater social inequality.
These are the concerns that are driving the endless escalation of
police powers, not a threat from a relative handful of terrorists.
Parallel build-ups of the capitalist state apparatus are underway
internationally, such as in France, where President Emmanuel Macron’s
regime is demanding permanent emergency powers. These developments are a warning of preparations for dictatorial methods of rule.
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